I've noticed that many people complain about how their newly configured system does not do this or that yet after they reinstall it, it works fine. I personally believe that it is the installer that messes up instead of blaming the person. Had the same thing happen with me on Debian3.0r5 (X doesn't start), Slackware (lib, libc, libc6 not properly installed), and more screw-ups during PXE setups. What do you guys think? Has this ever happened to you?

--Abid Kazmi

Fully-featured installers are really intricate bits of software, and hardware detection is definitely the most complex element. Having said that, the big distros have put a huge amount of work over the years into perfecting their particular installers (the new Debian installer in Sarge has taken three years to write) so you shouldn't hit problems with hardware on a current version provided that the kernel support for it is good.

I once had Anaconda fail to configure my Matrox Millenium graphics card, but that was six years ago, and I haven't any problems since.

I'm not critcizing Linux or any of their installers. I love linux and been using it for about six years now. I've just had problems happen sometimes here and there with the installers. Now I did take into consideration on how hard these distro's have been working to improve on their current releases. I just wanted to know other people's opinion towards them.
Thanks,

-=-EDIT-=-
25% done installing FC3 on my new box. Cheers .

--Abid Kazmi

Be careful with putting stuff in bold, it's kind the online equivalent of raising your voice

Part of my point was that you aren't really using installers that represent the current state of things. The installation system in the current Debian "stable" is actually the same installer that was shipped with the first Debian, and has actually been replaced - I beleive that Sarge will be declared the new "stable" next week. Slackware is a one man effort and not related to the Big Three families of distribution that most people use (Debian/Ubuntu, Red Hat/Fedora, SUSE). For strange reasons I actually have to install Fedora over and over again in different configurations as part of my work, and even the test releases work reliably - the Anaconda installer is just an awesome piece of software.

Uhh no it's not.

Golly, don't even feel like going into this but ok. If you read the whole thread or even the subject, you'll know it's not about anger, etc. So just leave it at that.

--Abid Kazmi